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You are viewing ARCHIVED CONTENT released online between 1 April 2010 and 24 August 2018 or content that has been selectively archived and is no longer active. Content in this archive is NOT UPDATED, and links may not function.Extract from article by Mitch Klein of Snell & Wilmer
The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure were recently amended. Amongst the changes, perhaps the most significant are the changes to discovery under Rule 26.
Previously, parties were entitled to conduct discovery regarding anything that might be “reasonably calculated” to lead to relevant and admissible evidence. In practice, this led to some parties deposing witnesses and subpoenaing documents with only a tenuous relationship to the real issues of the case. This kind of behavior caused significant costs and delays in litigation.
In environmental and national resource litigation, abusive discovery conduct typically results from parties without any real evidence looking for some (fishing expeditions), deep-pocketed parties trying to overwhelm their adversaries under a pile of documents and/or multiple and lengthy depositions, or parties who have no real idea what they were doing and are trying to figure it out along the way.
Read the complete article at Amended Federal Rules on Discovery to Impact Environmental Litigation